Re: Intrepid Museum Gets Shuttle Enterprise

Also wasn't most of it designed by Lockheed at their skunkworks facility in Palmdale?

Twas Rockwell, they always had facilities at Plant 42 in Palmdale as well. Lockheed kept pushing their LX-200 Starclipper design and wanted a titanium structure under the thermal tiles. Amusingly enough, NASA rejected the Starclipper because at the time they were pushing for a fully reusable flyback booster and the Starclipper would have placed a large fraction of the craft's hydrogen in a large conformal expendable external tank around the nose. As it was we got a large, external, expendable tank anyway once they decided to do away with the flyback booster and go for the 'cheaper now' alternative (which turned out not to be).

And well, if the shuttle had been built of titanium then it might have stood a chance at surviving the thermal protection problems that doomed STS-107.